All The Pretty Dead Girls. John Manning
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in Lebanon, the college town where she’d spent several mostly unhappy years.
Dr. Ginny Marshall had come back to Hammond to finish her book. She’d been working on Sightings of the Mother now for almost twenty years. All too frequently, she’d get distracted from it, getting stuck in mindless academia and forced onto other, more mundane projects that resulted in other books. But she always came back to this book. No matter how many times she’d given up on it, put it out of her head, boxed up her materials and hidden them away, somehow Sightings of the Mother always came back to her. She called it her personal Vietnam, the book she’d started without an exit plan. It was a joke she’d use when she was still married to Jim.
Los Zapatos, Mexico—that was where she’d started. Twenty years ago, when she was fresh out of graduate school and looking to start her Ph.D. Her marriage to Jim was still new and fresh, still in the honeymoon phase. He’d passed the bar and was working insane hours at his new job with a firm in Boston. She was teaching a couple of theology courses for undergraduates at Harvard, determined to get her Ph.D., tenure, and a name for herself in her field.
Research into the sightings of the Virgin Mary was an odd choice for a Ph.D. dissertation. Still, Jim was all for it—back then, her career was just as important to him as his own, even though the trip to Los Zapatos would strain their already strained finances. But it was also an adventure: flying to El Paso, renting a car and crossing the border, driving through the deserts of northern Mexico to that godforsaken little town. The roads were bad and there were times when Ginny feared she’d run out of gasoline in the middle of nowhere. The Mexican people of the region weren’t very friendly to her either; to them, she was the gringa with the bad accent. The Mexicans looked at her with suspicion in their dark eyes. They weren’t used to Americans, despite their proximity to the border. And Los Zapatos itself…
Calling it a town was a misnomer. It was a village, dirty and poor, with dusty unpaved streets and poor sanitation. The faithful who flocked to the village were better prepared than she was; they’d brought their own food, their own tents and sleeping bags. None of the villagers would speak to Ginny. But the pilgrims, from all over Mexico, they were different. They were happy to tell her about the Virgin and their faith—even if none of them could see or hear the Virgin. They only came to watch as the three young girls had visions, and to pray, and to leave flowers at the Holy Site.
The parish church was adobe and baked hard by the harsh sun. The priest, Fernando Ortiz, was only too happy to speak to Ginny in his own cultured Spanish. He was very proud of his origins in an upper-middle-class Mexico City family, and even more proud of the tough parish he had been sent to. His faith was strong, he assured her, and only made stronger by the Virgin’s miraculous appearance to three of his parishioners.
“Father, I would like to speak to the girls.” Ginny requested, seated in a hard chair in his hot office inside the little church.
The tall handsome priest shook his head. “Impossible. The archbishop has refused permission for them to speak to reporters.”
She tried again to explain she wasn’t a reporter. She was a scholar. But her arguments fell on deaf ears. She understood the only information she’d get would come through this intermediary, this upper-middle-class priest from Mexico City.
“So let me understand,” she said. “The Holy Mother has forbidden the girls to tell anyone what they’ve been told, isn’t that correct?”
Father Ortiz gave her a warm smile. “The Holy Mother has forbidden them to tell anyone other than their priest, Señora.”
“So, you know what the Virgin has said?” She leaned forward. “Are you sworn to secrecy, too?”
He leaned back in his chair. “I cannot tell you the Mother’s message, no. That is for my archbishop’s ears only. I go to Mexico City to meet with him next week.” He smiled at her. He was young, maybe not even Ginny’s own age just yet, with strong white teeth and thick black hair. “The Holy Mother talks to the girls, who are allowed to talk to me, and I can speak to the archbishop, who can only speak to His Holiness the Pope in Rome.”
“So I came all this way to try to understand this phenomenon…”
Ginny wasn’t averse to flirting with him, even if he was a priest. She smiled, looking up from under her long lashes.
He seemed to know what she was doing, and he smiled despite himself.
“Señora, I cannot tell you the Holy Mother’s message, but I can tell you this, because I like you.” He gestured for her to lean closer to his desk. “You might want to make yourself right with God.”
“I don’t understand.”
He gave her a smile. A sad smile, she thought. A smile that was both sad and rapturous at the same time. But he would say nothing more.
That afternoon, Ginny joined the pilgrims and walked out to the field a few miles outside of the little village, over dirt paths beaten down by the footsteps of others before. The sun was high and hot, and her shirt was soaked through with sweat before they reached the hillside. It was a nondescript place, buzzing with flies and dusty. She wiped sweat from her forehead. Close to a hundred people gathered on the hillside; a woman in a black veil offered Ginny a drink from a bottle of water.
The pilgrims stood in silence as three young girls, not quite teenagers, appeared on the opposite hill. The crowd buzzed with excitement for a moment, then all fell quiet again. Ginny watched the girls climb to the top of the opposite hill, then sink to their knees and turn their faces up to the bright blue sky, their arms outstretched. She watched as their eyes grew wider, and their faces began to glow as they smiled in joy. Not a muscle did they move for almost ten solid minutes. Then the glow faded from their faces and they rose, dusting off their knees. There was a murmur of excitement in the crowd as the girls climbed down their own hill.
That was it. The girls were hustled away by a flock of black-robed nuns.
Ginny stayed in Los Zapatos for a few days more, buying water and food from other pilgrims, sleeping next to the battered Volkswagen she’d rented, writing down notes and her impressions in the spiral notebook she’d brought along. Father Ortiz was no more forthcoming during any of their subsequent meetings, though he reiterated each time his plea to make herself “right with God.” Though Ortiz was stubborn, Ginny found herself liking the handsome young priest more and more.
On her third day there, a long black limousine appeared on an unpaved road that led into the village from the south, stirring up whirlwinds of dust. The limo stopped in front of the little church, its back doors opened from within, and all at once Father Ortiz and the three girls scurried from the front doors of the church. The four of them slipped inside the limo, the nuns depositing battered boxes of clothes and books into the trunk. Then the limo doors closed and the vehicle began its slow drive out of Los Zapatos toward Mexico City. The nuns made the sign of the cross as they watched it drive away.
Ginny knew the girls never returned to Los Zapatos. Indeed, the Church never put its stamp of approval on the sightings. No one was really sure whatever happened to the three young girls who claimed to have seen the Virgin. Not even their parents ever knew. It was presumed they were hidden away somewhere. After all, Rome had centuries of practice in keeping its secrets.
Now, holding the printouts in her hand, Ginny became aware that she was trembling just a little bit.
You might want to make yourself right with God.
She looked up at the ceiling. The room Sue was sleeping in was almost directly overhead.
Her story is so fantastic, Ginny thought. I don’t want to believe it
But she also knew it could be true.
The police officer’s story…and the words of the girl, Bernadette deSalis…they all came together now in some kind of horrible, terrifying logic.
She was trembling even more now.
And it’s no coincidence that Father Ortiz has shown up again after all these years…
Ginny